Jack of three trades, master of one: Ars reviews the Motorola Atrix 4G

In our review of the new Motorola Atrix 4G, we found that the Atrix is an …

The Atrix's Motoblur experience

The Atrix is running Android 2.2 Froyo, and sadly not the newer Gingerbread; however, as we mentioned before, it's faring pretty well with it. Like a few of the newer Android phones, the Atrix is also running Motorola's custom skin, named Motoblur. In previous versions, Motoblur was overly intrusive. That's no longer a problem, though many of the features of the skin seem a bit redundant given the capabilities of Android.

For example, one of Motoblur's big selling points is the widgets it can create for social networking services, messaging, and e-mail. While the widgets offer little preview snippets of text from new messages that are good for getting the gist of what your correspondents are saying, the phone also puts alerts for all new messages in a pulldown menu at the top of every screen. The widgets have the benefit of a preview, but you have to be on the right home screen to see them and you can only fit a few per home screen; the menubar alerts only inform you that you have a message (unless you only have a single new message, and then you do get a preview), but they're accessible with one touch from anywhere on the phone.

Motoblur lets you populate your homescreen with widgets that will update you on your latest messages

I found in using the phone that I preferred the pulldown menu, though even from here I was still routed into a Motoblur-skinned area (my e-mail run though Motoblur was white text on a black background, and my e-mail through the Android app was the opposite). This is what happens when you stubbornly set up your Google account on the phone in addition to the Motoblur account so you can handle e-mail in the independent app.

If you prefer to handle things through widgets, though, Motoblur is easy to use, and the system for placing, arranging, rearranging, and sizing widgets is very intuitive. Routing your stuff through Motoblur also has some advantages, including the ability to remote-wipe the phone via a Web interface. Some of the widget options have limited usefulness but could save you many treks through the settings menus, such as on/off toggles for airplane mode, GPS, Bluetooth, and WiFi.

The Lapdock: Atrix, that webtop hat doesn't look so great on you

The Atrix's ability to dock into a thin and light webtop computer, known as the lapdock, is meant to be one of the phone's biggest selling points. A set of ports flips out from the back of the computer, and once the phone is saddled up, a window with the phone's Android interface and dock of Web applications appear on the lapdock's screen. The experience is powered entirely by the phone's hardware as the lapdock has none of its own, save a battery. While the lapdock as powered by the phone was serviceable, it doesn't follow with the great experience of the Atrix itself.

The Atrix's gateway to existence as a webtop flips out of the back of the lapdock.

The expectations for a device like the lapdock can't be much higher than for a netbook, but we found even basic functionality to be a bit rough. Scrolling through the phone interface on the lapdock was a pain: once you clicked and held on the trackpad, you could move down or up through the phone's screens; however, the cursor on the screen would also move, meaning that you can only scroll so far before you have to reposition the cursor and start over again. You also can't scroll in the lapdock's Firefox or Facebook windows the same way you can in the phone's window, and having to switch between the two methods for the same hardware can be frustrating. The trackpad in the lapdock is crying out for multitouch, especially two-finger scrolling, but the functionality just isn't there.